Analysis 7: At World's End, but not the end of Orientalism

The sad truth about a great deal of Western culture and the art it produces is its often inherent thematic contradictions, usually when it comes to race, and especially when it comes to Orientalism. One such unfortunate example is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, a film whose central theme of freedom from oppression is undermined by the blatant way in which it subjugates the East. This is the third movie of the series, the first in which characters are introduced from Singapore, and from the moment they are introduced they are juxtaposed against the majority of characters of English decent, creating a clear attitude of Orientalism.

“The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said 1866), and this is clearly the world of Singapore at the beginning of the film. The British characters journey there to meet Sao Feng, a pirate who they hope will help them find the missing Jack Sparrow. Sao Feng proves to be not just an “exotic” type of character, but a devious liar, violent, and concerned only with his own self-interest. Although this can also be said of many of the other British pirates in the film, Sao Feng is still at a great disadvantage to them as characters – pirates like Jack Sparrow and Barbossa, who exhibit similar negative characteristics, yet still get the opportunity to be developed beyond that, often showing some admirable qualities throughout the course of the multiple movies in which they appear. Furthermore, by getting to know them, we are able to connect and sympathize with them, regardless of their flaws. By contrast, Sao Feng shows practically no admirable qualities and is never given adequate time to allow us to connect with him as a character – he is only in the movie until about half-way through when he is killed in a karmic fashion after capturing the main heroine Elizabeth, and sexually assaulting her, amongst other things.

Everything about this scene with Sao Feng and Elizabeth screams Orientalism. Sao Feng, like the Eastern “Other” he represents, “signifie[s] danger and threat” (Said 1886), attacking Elizabeth. But even on a more docile level, this entire scene promotes an exotic image of the Oriental – the sensuous music, markedly different from the rest of the film’s score, the way in which Elizabeth is dressed up – over dressed, Sao Feng entering speaking in his native tongue and his continued mysterious manner throughout the scene, even when speaking in English – dipping a leaf in water and eating it, discussing the myth of Calypso (whom he thinks Elizabeth is) – all things give off a mystical vibe of a world of otherness, contrasted against the rest of the film’s typically European attributes. In some ways, Sao Feng is even portrayed as animalistic – an inferior to the contrasted Western world of the film, “reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness” (Said 1871).

Yet what makes this Orientalism most depressing is the irony of it when one considers the larger themes of the film as a whole. In this film, the major conflict is the pirates and other various outcasts fighting against British imperialism. Lord Beckett heads the East India Trading Co., and seeks to gain full control of the seas by eliminating all pirates. “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies…The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (Said 1866). This colonization of the Orient by British powers is a perfect parallel to the pirates plight of being forced to succumb to British trade’s monopoly of the sea, and yet instead of using the presence of pirates from Singapore to further the strength of this theme, the film rather sticks with a sadly contrary view of the East as something that still needs to be dominated. The pirates of various European descent are seen fighting for freedom, and eventually obtaining it by the end of the film by destroying Beckett’s fleet. And yet, Sao Feng dies long before this – moreover, upon his death, he appoints Elizabeth the new captain of his ship, and for the rest of the film she takes his place as head of the Singapore pirates. Thus, it is not simply that the Orient does not deserve freedom, but to gain it, it must in fact become European-ized, the English Elizabeth now its representative. In the end, although Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End may support a theme of freedom in general, it nevertheless continues a long and sad tradition of supporting “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1868).



Works Cited

Said, Edward W.. “Orientalism.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1866-88. Print.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Writ. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Walt Disney Pictures, 2007.

Analysis 6: Femininity, Identity, and Mental Illness in Girl, Interrupted

The sickly woman has been a common feature of the patriarchal society putting women in their place for centuries, whether by describing them in vague terms as emotional, unstable, hysterical, or else ascribing to them particular diseases. As psychology expands, its terminology grows, and the discourse used to define us becomes more specific – bipolar, schizophrenic, anorexic. For Susanna Kaysen of the film Girl, Interrupted, these labels become a struggle of identity, as she must come to terms with being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and confined to a year-long stay in a mental hospital. “I don’t want to end up like my mother,” she tells her college counselor at the beginning of the film after declaring that she will not go to college and wants rather to become a writer. “Women today have more choices than that,” the counselor tells her, to which Susanna replies, entirely unbelieving, “No, they don’t.” Thus, in the 1960s society in which she lives, Susanna finds herself defined by her disorder, a kind of job title that lets her at the very least be able to distance herself from the traditional role of homemaker that she fears being forced into, like her mother before her.

“Such traditional, metaphorically matrilineal anxiety ensures that even the maker of a text, when she is a woman, may feel imprisoned within texts…which perpetually tell her how she seems” (Gilbert and Gubar 1931-32), and herein lies Susanna’s ultimate dilemma. Her text is her mental illness, and throughout the film she is confronted with the conundrum of deciding whether or not she writes this text herself, chooses not to get better – in a sense, her disorder is a liberating kind of identity that she clings to. And yet, it is also something that has been given to her by an outside source, a diagnosis placed upon her, something that imprisons her and tells her who she is.

The women of the mental hospital where Susanna is staying sneak away one night to have a look at their records, and Susanna gets to read her diagnosis for the first time. “Oh, that’s me,” is her first reaction upon reading the description of her disorder, to which her friend Lisa replies, “That’s everybody.” Although Susanna seems to find her diagnosis quite fitting, part of her also takes Lisa’s comment to heart, putting into question again what it means to be truly mentally ill. Susanna has been thrust into this category of the sick, the abnormal, and it’s something she is acutely aware is being used to define her in different ways than it would define a man. Upon learning that part of the symptoms of her condition include being “sexually promiscuous,” she asks her therapist, “How many guys would I have to sleep with to be considered promiscuous, textbook promiscuous? …10, 8, 5? And how many girls would a guy my age have to sleep with to be considered promiscuous? 10, 20, 109?” Susanna sees that, although her disorder may have a lot of truth to it, it is still something being used to put her in her place as a woman, using symptoms that would not necessarily earn a man the same title of being mentally ill, things that for a man could often be considered normal and natural.

“It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters” (Gilbert and Gubar 1932), and it is this dichotomy that Susanna sees all around her. Her choices are limited by the patriarchal society in which she finds herself, and she is all the more exasperated to see the women around her – the heads of the hospital, her school, her mother – behaving as though this is the way of the world, and there is nothing particularly wrong with it. Although Susanna finally comes, by the end of the film, to recognize that she is holding herself back and can overcome her mental illness, furthermore gaining independence and strength by doing so, she never stops seeing that a diagnosis is something imposed by society as a means of control, whether for women or anyone else. “Crazy isn’t being broken, or swallowing a dark secret, it’s you or me, amplified,” she tells us as the film closes, reaffirming this belief that being mentally ill is not so different from being normal, and thereby continuing her fight against a society in which binaries unfairly define the world – sane and crazy, normal and abnormal, man and woman.



Works Cited

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1926-38. Print.

Girl, Interrupted. Writ. Susanna Kaysen, Lisa Loomer, James Mangold, and Anna Hamilton Phelan. Dir. James Mangold. Columbia Pictures, 1999.

Analysis 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Simulacrum

If a person is a text, as postmodernism and poststructuralism attest, today’s generation would have to be the texts of computers, television, video games – all manner of electronic mediums. We communicate through electronics – we are increasingly developing our own discourse out of them, complete with emoticons, chatspeak, and acronyms that have even found their way into real life (or should I say “RL”), past the screen: LOL, WTF, the list goes on. We say three little letters, and these are meant to signify a whole slew of various emotions that relate to “laughing out loud.” We are the generation of the text message, the quick response – we thereby exemplify the poststructuralist standpoint that we are nothing more than a brief number of letters, nothing more than computer screens and cell phones. Behind these screens, do our “true” personalities and selves still exist? Or are we nothing more than these electronics with which we communicate? We are no longer interacting with each other, rather, we are interacting with a device that has taken our place.

In this same vein, video games provide an interesting look at how we interact with electronics on a fictional level. In playing video games, we aren’t just interacting with a text like a novel or film, something that we still recognize as existing somewhat independently of ourselves and our actions. In video games, we have a hand in creating the story on some level – we become the characters, we control their actions. And in this way, we are equally controlled by them. We begin to see ourselves in the game, the game as our reality. In this way, the film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World provides us with a reality in every way a simulacrum of video games. Scott Pilgrim is your average 20-something, struggling with relationships, but his life is nothing more than the text of a video game. For Scott and his world there is “no more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept” (Baudrillard 1557), for all of reality is a game and there is no distinction between the two.

Scott and his new girlfriend, Ramona, are getting along quite well in their relationship, but Ramona still has some emotional “baggage” holding her back – seven exes that keep coming back to haunt her and Scott and keep them from growing closer. And in their reality-as-video game, this is quite literal: Ramona’s exes have formed an “evil league” to stop her and Scott from being together. In order to move forward in their relationship, Scott finds himself having to fight them in various video game-style combat. Fistfights and weapon fights in the tradition of various combat games, musical fights reminiscent of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, even fights controlling magical creatures like something akin to Pokemon. And not only that, but when Scott’s defeated an ex, he gets to pick up some coins and bonus points for his trouble. In this way, Scott and Ramona’s relationship is “nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture” (Baudrillard 1566), as they work through their emotional baggage not by connecting romantically or personally, but through the action of a video game, through fights and collecting abstract points to add to a score that may or may not in any way relate to their “winning” of this game of love on any real level. For their reality is “a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1557).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvqzWHvrZiA

The final fight scene is a prime example of all of Scott’s reality working like a video game. Here, Scott fights the “final boss battle” against Gideon, Ramona’s most recent ex who she has now gotten back together with. As Scott declares his love for Ramona, he is told by an anonymous narrator voice that he has “earned the power of love,” which gives him a powerful weapon to use in his fight and a level up. Again, we see Scott’s love for Ramona translated into something else, a tool to be used in a fight, a further skill level to be achieved, and this fight again stands between him and the person he seeks to connect with on the other side. Eventually, Scott is killed, but because he picked up an “extra life” in a previous scene he is able to come back. He learns from his little near-death experience a valuable lesson of “self respect,” and he realizes he needs to take responsibility for his own past mistakes, upon which he gets to retry the level that is his confrontation with Gideon. We then see him apologizing to various people, like his friends and former band mates, as well as his ex-girlfriend Knives, and Ramona herself. This is once more all approached from the standpoint of a video game – each time Scott apologizes he gets more points added to his score, and is finally able to defeat Gideon with the help of Knives, having regained her friendship. In the end, Scott and Ramona walk off together to try their relationship once more, and do have a momentary scene where they connect as two people, not as two players in a game. And yet, the thing that brings them ultimately together is Scott’s defeat of Gideon, something purely narratological, symbolic – a simulacrum that takes the place of their relationship, their true human connection.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World may just be a movie, but it poses some serious questions about what our reality truly is. Are we ever more than our various modes of discourse, our texts, whether fictional or otherwise? Are we people or heroes in our own video games, playing by rules we don’t so often make ourselves as are programmed into us from before we even begin – by the world in which we are born into and the ideologies we are presented with. For the video game hero is never free – he is always controlled by the person playing on the other side of the screen. The question is, are we so sure our reality isn’t the game itself? If so, we are controlled by the game, the text – not the other way around.


Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1556-66. Print.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Writ. Michael Bacall, Bryan Lee O'Malley, and Edgar Wright. Dir. Edgar Wright. Universal Studios, 2010.